Tricky is worried.
He's working on a new albumand it's great - all peace
and love. But what willhappen now he's started
taking male hormones? Tina Jackson meets trip-hop's
tortured soul

He's
got a pot leg. A month or so ago, in a club in New York where he now lives,
his big mouth got him into trouble and somebody pushed him over. Four of
the bones in his foot were broken. Now his leg's in plaster. He's not too
bothered, accepts he got what was coming to him. "Can't get away with being
as rude as I am"' he growls, his smoked-out Bristol burr disarmingly lacking
in rancour. It's not without its advantages, either. "I quite like it now.
I've always been an attention seeker. It's a way of geffing attention."
Limping frenetically round the Salford hotel where he's staying with an
entourage, attention is trailing him like the wedding-dress train he's
been known to wear for photographs. Attention is a big
deal for Adrian Thaws, 29, whose mother died when he was four, whose father
slunk out of his infancy like a fugitive tomcat and who was brought up
by his grandmother and a motley collection of uncles, aunts, cousins and
friends: villains, gangsters, boxers, drug dealers. He's obsessed by the
kind of person he could have been. "There are two things that could have
happened to me," he says. "I could have been a thief, or I could have got
into music." But the Bristol music scene, which spawned the legendary Wild
Bunch and

the Massive Attack soundsystem,
gave him a launch pad to more attention than even he could dream of. Adrian
metamorphosed into Tricky, whose own possessed music became the mirror
for a disintegrating culture which is watching itself fall apart. Tricky
is now in the limelight wherever he goes, marching to the different drum
he's heard in his head since he was a 15-year-old hoolie who told all his
friends he was going to be famous. "What for?" they'd snigger. "For thieving?"
But Tricky had the last laugh. His acclaimed 1995 debut Maxinquaye was
only the beginning. With each subsequent release his disturbingly beautiful
depictions of wheezing paranoia set to fragmented, looped samples of noise
became more haunted, more intense. It was less than ever like anything
previously considered pop music. Steroid treatment for his asthma has left
him, he claims "without no male hormones in my body" and he worries that
the hormone treatment he's currently receiving will change his writing,
will make his lyrics macho, aggressive. "Now, they sound like they're written
by a woman," he describes. The former
ghetto boy turned weirdo hero has been defiantly, outspokenly difficult.
He denounced the 'trip-hop' label stuck on

what he'd called hip-hop blues and
mutant music and verbally assaulted reporters - notably Andrew Smith of
The
Face, who he felt had ventured into the private territory of his life.
Formerly romantically involved with professional kookstress Björk,
he now refers to her as "a vampire". In the
flesh he's small, frail but wiry, funny, intensely friendly. "I joke all
the time," he confesses, "to stop feeling the sadness." He is a whirlwind
of windmilling arms, with baby dreads like demented antennae sticking out
from his narrow face as he breakfasts with a crew of relatives and friends
from Bristol. They're making records with him on his own Durban Poison

extended like the barrel of
a gun. "I said, you're not selling coke now," he tuts. Going
into the studio with the Baby Namboos happened because of the cover-story
success of his 22-year-old uncle, Finlay Quaye, whose debut single received
wide coverage this year. "I only met him a year ago," says Tricky. "I've
seen him on front covers so I know what benefits him is being in my family.
I know people who are my real family who I can benefit I'm trying to make
my family money as well. I want them to have a chance. "I want
to believe in something," he continues passionately, but his next

listeners. "It's a bit
like a voodoo ceremony," he says of his work. His intensive
drug use isn't hedonism, he claims, but escape or a creative tool. "It
gives you schizophrenia - God complexes and devil complexes". He smokes
weed, he explains, to get variously out of it (in life) or into it (in
work.) "In real life I have a problem taking mushrooms and draw. But in
real life I have a problem anyway," he admits with a childlike candour. If there
are keys to understanding the enigma of Tricky, they're his relationship
with the ghost of his mother and his intense need to nurture the family
he has now. He wants to do his best for his daughter Maisey, her mother,
his co-singer Martina and his friends and family. "My Chinese
doctor said I got into singing because of my asthma, but I think it was
because of my Mum. She was too early dead and I think she's got things
to say, she's saying them through me." His first album, Maxinquaye,
was
named after her. Maisey,
who's two, is the key to his future. "My Dad left when I was four, and
I was scared I would be like him," Tricky recounts. "But it. made me be
different She's with me all the

label under the name of the Baby
Namboos, but no one's letting on what the music sounds like. "I'm not telling
you," he says. Then he relents. "It sounds like council houses. It sounds
like being on the dole. It sounds like my music." When they have their
photograph taken, he tells one of them off for posing with fingers

offering is "I go through periods
of depression. People ask why I'm so angry. It's because I've been through
things they've never imagined."Fascinated by the horrors of violence,
bitterly nihilistic, he's a workaholic "because there's nothing else in
life". He uses his immense energy to create states of mind - in himself
and in his

time. She's the love of my life
- everything I do is for her." He worries about her having to grow up and
learn to lose people. "She breaks my heart. When you love someone, you
don't want them to feel any kind of pain. "What's
changed me is not caring, not giving a fuck," he insists. But it's patently
obvious he cares deeply. Giving as he is towards his own or anyone who
touches him - including the homeless for whom he used to leave hefty anonymous
donations when he lived in London, and for whom he'd love to do a benefit
gig if his management agreed - he's ruthless about those who aren't
"real" or who

treat others with cruelty. "The
first time I was hit was by a policeman. I've been in prison and they let
me have an asthma attack and nearly die. Some people are dogs and need
to be put down," he spits. He insists that having violence done to a person
will make them, in turn, violent. There's a saying he keeps repeating:
"There's many a good heart does bad things." Sometimes it's a mantra, sometimes
a confession. The new
album he's made, will, he expects, surprise people when it comes
out next year. "Sometimes it surprises me. It's chilled-out, positive,
all about peace and love. It's got

lyrics like, 'these men will break
your bones, don't know how to build stable homes'. Homes are important
to me," he adds, "because I never had one." His take
on the world will remain unique; his displaced inner-city blues will still
carry the conviction of his honesty and his tender, bleak, brutal vision.
"I do documentaries of life," he insists. "I'm not a musician. I'm from
a council estate. All I can do is give you what I feel. I don't know what
I'm doing and I don'twant to learn."